The animal folk have always shown us the way. If you've ever lived with a dog during a difficult season, you know they have an uncanny ability to sense when something shifts in the household. They feel the tension, the sadness, the weight of what we're carrying—even when we think we're hiding it well.

Our PDX Office Just Got Even More Welcoming | There's something special about a handmade sign that says "you are welcome here." And thanks to the incredible craftsmanship of Livy Long and her partner Marcelo, our Portland office now has exactly that.

Children's Grief Awareness Day: A Reflection on Real Conversations | Today is Children's Grief Awareness Day, and in honor of that, I'm sharing a previous post about my kiddo's first fish death.

Your Grief Has Something to Tell You. I think a lot about my relationship to grief—both my own personal losses and the grief I encounter related to world events and the ongoing struggles in our country. I think a lot about my relationship to grief—both my own personal losses and the grief I encounter related to world events and the ongoing struggles in our country. And here's what I've come to understand: My ability to be with my grief directly informs my ability to discern

We are glad to announce the start of our In-Person Adult Grief Group in Washington, D.C., beginning Tuesday, February 18th. If you're navigating the death of someone you love, this group offers a space to be witnessed, supported, and understood by others who know what it's like to carry loss.

My Updated Coping Plan as of February 2025 I admit that since November, I have coped by keeping my head down, not writing much, frenetically adding activities to the schedule, eating way too much licorice and cheese, and not carving any time to be still, to read, or to look up. Sound familiar? When the Universe Gifts You a Pause Three weeks ago, my 8-year-old fractured her ankle. She earned herself crutches and a boot. I earned myself hours of cancelling all of our activities

Day 65 : After a series of heavier posts, I offer up an ode to one of the wisest grief companions in my life: our Holland Lop, Snowball. Seriously—he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t offer advice, he wants to be close, he is ridiculously soft, he is consistent and simple in his demands, and his downfalls are minimal (carpet chewing and feet licking). An important part of being able to move through grief is to oscillate-meaning coming up from the existential dread, deep missing, and

Day 64: Hard Grief Truths So much of my personal and professional work exists in the realm of building tolerance—tolerance for distress, tolerance for sitting with the unknown, with what doesn’t make sense, with what isn’t fair, and with what we cannot control and fix. On its face, this might sound like a dismal pursuit and job. Yet, it is not. For I believe we humans are all capable of expanding our tolerance—because we really don’t have much of a choice. To expand our

Day 62: The “Who-to-Tell” Pyramid As I reflect on the early days of my own acute grief, I remember the hazy quality of everything—the air, my thoughts, other people’s offerings of condolences. There was a benevolent fog over everything. I remember needing to not talk about anything related to my dad’s death, except with my daughter, mom, and sisters, for about two weeks. My system couldn’t tolerate expanding this circle, and I honored that. My clients often describe so

Day 61: The Missing Keeps Happening Before experiencing acute grief, it’s hard to conceptualize the level of missing that grievers live with. Let me try to break it down: when a person you love dies, they continue to stay dead--every. single. day. My clients warned me of this. And now I know what this actually means. The missing doesn’t go away. In fact, it is cumulative. It adds up. It’s a lot of days that keep happening to miss someone AND it’s a lot of days to ponde

Day 60: Pause. Get Quiet. Get Still. Drink a Paloma. Turn Inward. Shift. I am living what I have witnessed so often—the increased rawness of grief, sometimes beginning a couple months after the loss. It’s the moment when people begin to stop asking about it/you/the person who died as much. And it is also the moment (for me) when it no longer feels healing to speak of the experience out loud, as much. I feel more protective of my grief—not because it needs to be closeted

Day 59: How Does a Therapist Grieve #12 ? PLAY Yep. You read it correctly. Even after my marriage died, then after my dad died—even after Buffalo and Uvalde, the assault on Roe-v-Wade, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Gorge Floyd, Jan 6, the wild fires out west—after each of these onslaughts—I tried to play. This is not an act of forgetting. Or being flippant or disrespectful. It is an act of connecting. An act of defiance and refusal. It doesn’t mean that playing feels wonderful

Day 58: How Does a Therapist Grieve #11 ? Knowing the Differences between Empathy and Compassion This may be a controversial topic because there is so much out there that tells us we lack empathy in the world. I don’t necessarily agree (mainly with the semantics of that). I think there is a lack of the ability to tolerate an empathetic connection beyond 4 seconds. Empathy is a feeling with—one human’s nervous system connecting to another’s to take the perspective and fe

Day 59: How Does a Grief Therapist Grieve #10 ? Allow the Absence to Take Shape The grief is taking up residence. It has moved in. It is taking shape. It’s been about 2 months and my grief is no longer diffuse and hard to pin down, like it was at the beginning. Instead, it has weight and shape to it—even a sharpness that I don’t want to admit feels harder to bear than at the beginning. There is so much irony in this grief process—allowing the grief to take shape, and

Day 57: How Does a Therapist Grieve #9 ? I let myself fall apart in the car and on the airplane. Cars and planes can be grief incubators. They provide (in my opinion) a pretty damn good recipe for being able to sit with the pain of your grief. Here is the recipe: Strangers + Forced Space for Unfocused Attention + Existential Thoughts (maybe more on planes due to hurling through the air) + Forced Stillness + Literal Perspective (watching the silliness of human lives t

Day 56: How Does a Grief Therapist Grieve #8 ? I hold the possibility that there is enough space for both my own grief AND for the immensity of grief that so many are experiencing in our country and world. The assault on Roe v Wade (aka WOMEN) interacts with my own grief. The terror of the War in Ukraine elicits my own grief. I believe that in its pure and honest form, grief connects us, instead of divides us. Grief is a human experience. All so often, I hear this from

Day 55: How Does a Therapist Grieve #7 ? Surrendering to Receiving (featuring work by artist @paulxrutz ) Receiving help can feel like an admission of not-okness. Over the years, I’ve seen it happen in some clients as they walk through the door of my office, tears welling up as they land in a spot that acknowledges that they are not doing well. Receiving might also feel hard because of societal learnings and burdens around reciprocity. I am finding that to receive from

Day 54: How Does a Therapist Grieve #6 ? Facing the truth that the grief will not go away. Saying that the grief “won’t go away” can be frightening. Yet, I’ve found for so many grievers, this phrase is also relieving. But why? We are pressured so often to “be ok” when we’re really not, to be “moved on,” when there is no such thing, to “let go” when the context of our lives does not allow that, and for our grief to “subside” when what does that even mean in grief? Being a

Day 53: How Does a Therapist Grieve #5 ? Seek Out Projects (Hammer preferred) I grew up going to the hardware store with my dad. I always appreciated (and still do) the consistent candy options at the check-out, the concrete floors, a full aisle of nails, and even the sharp sound of a key being cut. My daughter and I have found ourselves at ACE many times over the past year, and even more in the past month. Recently, we’ve built a platform/elevator with pulley for her

Day 52: How Does a Therapist Grieve #4 ? Allowing For Not Knowing and Mind Changing My ability and willingness (and even relief) to say “I have no idea,” no matter what that not knowing is about, has been a learning I’ve embraced since the beginning of the pandemic. Not knowing and saying it out loud is in my experience, a shift from a feeling of helplessness to an experience of powerlessness. I choose powerlessness any day, which I experience as a full embrace of what